E-FLUX JOURNAL

Martha Rosler: Culture Class

Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood & Anton Vidokle (Eds.)

In this collection of essays, conceptual art pioneer Martha Rosler considers the economic and historical precedents for today’s soft ideology of creativity, with special focus on its elaborate retooling of class distinctions. In the creative city, the neutralization of subcultural movements and the professionalization of the artist combine with an army of freelancers and interns to constitute a new social sphere in which traditional markers of difference don’t apply, allowing class distinctions to be utterly dissolved or willfully suppressed. The result is a handful of cities where artists in search of cheap rent become the avant-garde pioneers of gentrification, and no one asks any longer where all of this came from and how. With an introduction by historian and writer Stephen Squibb.

Add to your order

E-FLUX JOURNAL

Benjamin H. Bratton
Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution

Equal parts Borges, Burroughs, Baudrillard and Black Ops, Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution charts a treacherous landscape of paranoid master plans, failed schemes and dubious histories. Benjamin H. Bratton’s kaleidoscopic theory- fiction links utopian fantasies of political violence with equally utopian programs of security and control. Blurring reality and delusion, they collaborate on a literally psy- chotic politics of architecture. The cast of characters include insect urbanists, seditious masquerades, epistolary ideologues, carnivorous installations, branded revolts, im- ploding skyscrapers, sentimental memorials, sacred hijackings, vampire safe-houses, suburban enclaves, big-time proposals, ambient security protocols, disputed borders- of-convenience, empty research campuses, plus much more. In this mosaic we glimpse a future city built with designed violence and the violence of design. As one ratifies the other, the exception becomes the ruler. The tenth title in the E-Flux Journal series. Bratton is associate professor of visual arts and director of The Center for Design and Geopolitics at UC San Diego, whose work in theory spans philosophy, art and design.

Add to your order

E-FLUX JOURNAL

Are You Working Too Much?
Post-Fordism, Precarity and the Labor of Art

Julieta Aranda, Anton Vidokle and Brian Kuan Wood

It is infuriating that most interesting artists are perfectly capable of functioning in at least two or three professions that are, unlike art, respected by society in terms of compensation and general usefulness. Furthermore, when the flexibility, certainty and freedom promised by being part of a critical “outside” are considered as extensions of recent advances in economic exploitation, does the field of art then become the uncritical, complicit “inside” of something far more compelling? This latest issue of e-flux journal addresses these important (though somewhat hostile) questions in the in-your-face style the journal is known for. Cover design by Liam Gillick.

Add to your order

E-FLUX JOURNAL

The Internet Does Not Exist

Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood & Anton Vidokle

The internet does not exist. Maybe it did exist only a short time ago, but now it only remains as a blur, a cloud, a friend, a deadline, a redirect, or a 404. If it ever existed, we couldn’t see it. Because it has no shape. It has no face, just this name that describes everything and nothing at the same time. Yet we are still trying to climb onboard, to get inside, to be part of the network, to get in on the language game, to show up on searches, to appear to exist. But we will never get inside of something that isn’t there. All this time we’ve been bemoaning the death of any critical outside position, we should have taken a good look at information networks. Just try to get in. You can’t. Networks are all edges, as Bruno Latour points out. We thought there were windows but actually they’re mirrors. And in the meantime we are being faced with more and more—not just information, but the world itself.

Add to your order

E-Flux Journal Reader 2009

Julieta Aranda, Anton Vidokle, Brian Kuan Wood

Add to your order

E-FLUX JOURNAL

What is Contemporary Art?

This book began as a two-part issue of e-flux journal devoted to the question: What is contemporary art? At this point, has modernity become our antiquity? A single hegemonic “ism” has replaced clearly distinguishable movements and grand narratives. But what exactly does it mean to be working under the auspices of this particular ism? This absorbing collection of writings puts the apparently self-evident term into doubt, asking critics, curators, artists and writers to contemplate the nature of this catchall category. Contributors include Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Boris Groys, Raqs Media Collective, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hu Fang, Jörg Heiser, Martha Rosler, Zdenka Badovinac, Carol Yinghua Lu, Dieter Roelstraete, and Jan Verwoert.

Add to your order

E-FLUX JOURNAL: MOSCOW SYMPOSIUM

Conceptualism Revisited

Boris Groys (Ed.)

The Soviet Union was still going strong in the 1970s when a group of dissident artists now known as the

Moscow Conceptualists began using their work to confront the triumphs and failures of socialism. This collection of essays on the movement appears with an introduction by the uniquely qualified editor and commentator Boris Groys, who combines his varied careers as an art critic and media theorist with an NYU professorship in Russian and Slavic studies. Moscow Symposium is the newest title in Sternberg’s rousing, entertaining E-Flux series and the second journal edited by Groys (his first is Going Public). The series takes discussions, symposia, panels, forums and texts already interacting with thinkers online and turns them into small-format, soft-cover readers.

Communism had already converted objects to ideas—collective property—and citizen-subjects to nonprofessional artists. Thus, the found object, the elevating of idea over material, and the disappearance of the artist’s hand were already indistinguishable from an ideological landscape taken for granted by the artists who lived in that world. Interestingly, it is in this sense that Moscow Conceptualism must be considered: not only as the work of dissident artists confronting the triumphs and failures of socialism, but also as a continuous line of inquiry producing radically unexpected terms for non-alienated art.

Groys and other contributors take the works and activities of the Moscow Conceptualists as a departure point and consider how the modest artistic practices they developed in the 1970s reflect the resilience and flexibility of a more general sphere of conceptualisms in the plural. Essays by Claire Bishop, Keti Chukhrov, Ekaterina Degot, Jörg Heiser, Terry Smith, Anton Vidokle and Sarah Wilson explore the residue of an era which is becoming forgotten with astonishing speed.

Add to your order

EAST COAST EUROPE

Markus Miessen

East Coast Europe, which took place during Spring 2008, is a project about the perceptions of contemporary European identity and its relation to spatial practices and international politics. “Europe” in the title is the central topic for investigation, its contemporary culture, expansion and its status as a continuing social project. “East Coast” refers to two distinct edges of Europe, both real and imaginary—the geographical East Coast of the United States of America and the political “East Coast” of the European Union. The book details a dense network of contemporary experience of the EU’s extensive exchange of knowledge, people, and goods with the US and also with its own eastern border. Contributions by Shamim Momin, Taryn Simon, Marina Abramovic, Orchard, Kazys Varnelis, Lisa Farjam, Jordan Wolfson, Sislej Xhafa, Nedko Solakov, et al. The book also includes a transcript of a panel discussion at the Vera List Centre for Arts and Politics, The New School (NY).

Add to your order

THE ECONOMY IS SPINNING

Kris Dittel (Ed.)

The Economy Is Spinning began as an exhibition project and public program aimed at exploring the language of economics and finance—a language that permeates our vocabularies and shapes our imagination. Contributions are by a group of nine international artists, writers and theorists including Mercedes Azpilicueta, Kris Dittel, Zachary Formwalt, Sara Giannini, Monique Hendriksen, Jan Hoeft, Sami Khatib, Hanne Lippard, Toril Johannessen, Robertas Narkus, Antonis Pittas, Nick Thurston, McKenzie Wark and Rafaela Dražic, who together consider the economy as a “performing body” revealing itself through the underlying mechanisms of language. The fully illustrated softcover reader presents images, essays and texts addressing how the language of economics and finance influences our thinking and expression. Kris Dittel is an independent curator and editor living and working in the Netherlands. She is associate curator at the Onomatopee project space in Eindhoven, an art book publisher, and member of the research duo The Translation Trip, who investigate translation as practice, philosophical notion and curatorial device.

Add to your order

THE EMANCIPATED MUSEUM

Steven ten Thije

In The Emancipated Museum, Dutch art historian and researcher Steven ten Thije (b. 1980) engages in a personal inquiry into the importance of art museums in our ever more fragmented society. Despite museums’ unprecedented success in attracting masses of visitors, the future of museums is uncertain. They may portray a sense of calm and self-assurance to outsiders, but museums are far from immune to the cracks in society. The tensions between high and low, newcomer and native, rich and poor insidiously worm their way into museum foundations. Ten Thije looks toward a future in which art museums might become part of a new emancipation movement—a future in which museums offer an open environment that prioritizes the quality of the museum visit and challenges visitors to make their own choices. A pocket-sized publication with a serious and important message to share, The Emancipated Museum is volume 12 in the series commissioned by the Mondriaan Fund presenting essays on issues regarding art and culture today.

Add to your order